Can economic sanctions succeed as foreign policy?

• Author: Nathan, James A.

The hotly debated trade and human rights discussion regarding China is but a symptom of a more worrisome tendency in U.S. foreign policy: i.e., the rising proclivity to resort to unilateral economic sanctions. These have become an issue at a time when international trade accounts for 33% of the nation's business expansion and even more of large American companies' profits.

The National Association of Manufacturers notes that, between 1993 and 1996, the U.S. adopted 61 unilateral sanctions. The latter year was a record, with 23 new Congressional acts enjoining commerce of some kind with 35 countries. These measures left the U.S. in a peculiar self-selected isolation, for none of these plethora of sanctions, in the end, were embraced by the rest of the international community.

The purposes for which sanctions are employed are hardly trivial. After all, it is an American interest to live in a world with reduced brutality and fewer war-like potentates. Nevertheless, unilateral sanctions exact a serious price. The Institute for International Economics has released a study indicating that they cost American exporters at least $19,000,000,000 worth of trade a year and nearly 200,000 jobs. Moreover, commerce with about 42% of the world's population is left, perhaps irretrievably, to allies and competitors.

If free trade is as beneficial as claimed by more than several generations of policymakers, economists, political scientists, and business leaders, what accounts for the rising use of a singular economic cudgel in the policy arsenal? There are four elements that help explain the response to use sanctions to express diplomatic displeasure:

Sanctions are historically familiar. Since Thomas Jefferson, Americans have been certain that, in a "contest of self-denial," the U.S. would prevail. Sanctions, the Republican faction of the Founding Fathers argued (against the Federalists), were a form of "peaceable coercion." Governments, especially the British, would be compelled to yield to American pressures, for, in the logic of James Madison and Jefferson, the British need for American goods and services was essential to England's well-being. In contrast, Americans would have to give up little of value-mere "geegaws" in Jefferson's words.

The end of the Cold War supports the notion of sanctions. Even the impeccably liberal New, York Times columnist Tom Wicker explained that it was U.S. economic pressure (albeit made more insupportable by an arms race the...